Combining Moral Foundations and Justice Sensitivity Perspectives to Understand Political Orientation

Political orientation is systematically related to individuals’ endorsement of different moral domains. Yet, current findings suggest that differences between conservatives and liberals can also be explained by a sensitivity to self-oriented or other-oriented moral transgressions. We argue that conceptualizing moral foundations as perspective-specific advances our understanding of differences in moral judgments across the political spectrum. We test a new instrument measuring perspective-specific moral foundations in a nationally representative German sample ( N = 2,042). Our findings indicate that (a) an Integrated Foundations × Perspective Model fits the data better than models only representing moral foundations or moral perspectives and (b) a self-oriented moral sensitivity is related to right-wing political orientation, while an other-oriented moral sensitivity is related to left-wing political orientation across all moral foundations.